Andrew Stanton Talks In the Blink of an Eye, Toy Story 5

[This story contains mild spoilers for In the Blink of an Eye.]

Andrew Stanton wants you to know that his sensibilities go beyond the wholesome family entertainment he’s helped shepherd at Pixar since the ’90s. 

The director’s newest film — and first live-action movie since 2012’s now-cult favorite John Carter — is In the Blink of an Eye, a triptych narrative that chronicles human beings at different points across a nearly 50,000-year time span. Stanton depicts the fundamental lives of three very different families in 45,000 BCE, present day/near future and 2417 CE. The first braided timeline explores the intersection between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in 45,000 BCE. The second establishes the challenging, yet budding, romance between two academics, Claire (Rashida Jones) and Greg (Daveed Diggs), in 2025. And finally, Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is introduced as a “longevity-enhanced pilot” on an interstellar spaceship in 2417 CE. The historical/family/sci-fi drama makes the point that the differences between us in each time period aren’t as vast as you might think. No matter the era, we live, love, learn and die.

Blink may be an experimental film that, on the surface, bears little resemblance to Stanton’s timeless hits like Finding Nemo (2005) WALL-E (2008) and Finding Dory (2016) — but there’s plenty of thematic overlap if you choose to go down the rabbit hole.

“People assume that I’m 12 years old and G-rated just because of the sandbox I’ve been put into [at Pixar]. It’s the greatest sandbox in the world to make movies, so I’m not complaining. But it doesn’t necessarily represent my taste and what I like to go see,” Stanton tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s been fun to finally be able to try new things, and different things, with every job I’ve been taking.”

Getting into mild spoiler territory, McKinnon’s character is hundreds of years old. She is the recipient of gene replacement technology that Greg and Claire’s son, David (Luc Roderique), invented as the founder of a tech company called Elixir. She received the ability to seemingly live forever because she’s tasked with the overwhelming responsibility of preserving humanity. She not only has to venture to a new planet for humans to reside, but she also has to artificially birth human life during her 336-year journey to Kepler-16b. 

She eventually explains to one of her children that only certain people are permitted to live for an indefinitely longer period of time. When David introduced his creation (also known as Elixir) somewhere in the mid-21st century, he presented it as a breakthrough for all of mankind, but Coakley (McKinnon) indicates that the tech was later pulled from the market. This implies that David himself second guessed his life’s work or that lawmakers forced him to stop playing God. 

Stanton doesn’t know the particulars of what happened, but he does compare the scenario to other innovations throughout history. Once mankind realizes the unintended consequences of any advancement, it’s, generally, regulated. But the filmmaker does reveal a deleted scene that may have either sparked David’s reversal on selling such a monumental product or the Federal Government’s decision to prohibit it. 

“We shot a scene in the future, sort of midway, where David, the tech inventor of Elixir, is watching the news with his husband. There’s riots in the streets about privilege and who does or doesn’t have access to this technology with the ability to live longer. We assumed it would be a class issue for a while,” Stanton shares. “But it became a left-brain thing that just forced you to think politically. It forced you to think about things outside of the emotions of relationships. So we just didn’t miss it when we took it out.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Stanton also offers a status update on his next film, Toy Story 5.

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In 2017, you went on a five or six-year run of directing high-profile television shows, including Better Call Saul. I theorized at the time that you were getting your live-action sea legs back under you for a live-action movie. Was that actually the case? 

You theorized correctly. I missed it. I’d rather be on a set and practically working anonymously than trying to further some career on paper or on a website. So I was happy to get back into the game with Stranger Things, and I’ve been on a steady diet of it ever since. 

With you being one of the primary storytellers behind some of history’s most wholesome family entertainment at Pixar, I loved how you helmed one of the darkest sequences on Saul. Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) treated a few punks like piñatas (in season four’s sixth episode, “Piñata“). Do you welcome any chance to go off brand? 

Absolutely. People assume that I’m 12 years old and G-rated just because of the sandbox I’ve been put into [at Pixar]. Look, it’s the greatest sandbox in the world to make movies that everybody wants to go see and that all ages can go see. So I’m not complaining. But it doesn’t necessarily represent my taste and what I like to go see — or what I’ve been going to since I was a kid. So I have a large diet of arthouse films, dark films, light films and abstract films. It’s a wide, wide menu. So after about 25 years of being in one big, big sandbox, it’s been fun to finally be able to try new things, and different things, with every job I’ve been taking. 

In the Blink of an Eye is exactly that. It’s a triptych narrative that takes place in 45,000 BCE, present day-ish and 2417 CE. And while each timeline has a markedly different setting, the characters are still living the same fundamental lives. We’re all standing on each other’s shoulders, not just the giants among us. Am I being too reductive? Or is that very much the point?

Yeah, it’d be an easy soundbite to say what I’m trying to say. But all I’m looking for is the ride that you’re on for the time that the theater or your living room is dark. And I hope that you’re emotionally journeying during that ride. I was trying to get the feeling I had for 90 minutes when I read Colby Day’s first draft of the script. So it’s an experience that you’re hoping to give people, not a theme. It’s great if there is one, but I find it a little bit more satisfying when everybody walks out saying their own version of what they think something is about. Even if they’re all somewhat saying the same thing, they took it in the way they wanted to, just like you take in a good song or a good piece of art on the wall. So it was about the experience of sitting in that world for 90 minutes that I really fell in love with [on first read].

I’m sure the transitions between each timeline were scripted one way, but did the sequencing change a lot in the edit?   

Fundamentally, no. But since it’s constantly moving and threading like a braid, it pivoted a lot. We knew it would. In the year that we worked together on the script before we shot, Colby and I realized there were endless opportunities to shift. It was like pulling wrinkles on a bedsheet; it would just cause more wrinkles somewhere else. So you had to be ready to pivot, and it was a little bit like jazz. That’s why I wanted Colby on set when we were shooting. We shot more than what we knew we would use, and we could then pivot both in dialogue and in concept a lot more easily when we saw opportunities or connections that we didn’t see before. We kept doing that during editing for about six-to-eight months.

Even the music made connections that we didn’t necessarily foresee, and that was what was so fun. It was just this constantly deep level of creating and forming that I’m not used to having. In animation, it’s a little bit more like a symphony where you plan, plan, plan, and then you execute exactly what’s been written. There’s only a little bit of change. But this was free-form jazz, and it was so refreshing. There was a plan, but the plan understood that there was probably going to be something even better as you discovered the way it was actually going to be executed. 

Did you create a linear cut just for your own curiosity? 

Well, our editor did a linear cut of each storyline just to understand all the pieces we had. Like I said, we shot more than what we needed, and we didn’t know what was essential versus what wasn’t essential. The best example I can give is that it’s like photographing somebody long enough that you understand the prominent elements about their identity. If you had to pare them down to a caricature, you’d have the right essential qualities. So it was a learning process for us to know what we could afford to lose versus what we can afford to keep so that we get the essence of those storylines.

There’s a character in Blink who invents a gene replacement technology so that people can live for a very long time, if not forever. However, in Kate McKinnon’s character’s timeline, she comments on how people decided it was wrong. It’s now only for certain exceptions like her. This implies Elixir either put the genie back in the bottle themselves, or they were forced to do it by law. 

Yes.

I lean toward the latter because I have a hard time believing that a tech conglomerate would willingly remove such a monumental invention from the market. Anyway, do you know the off-screen story there? 

No, but because we do such a broad jump in time, we just took the ethos that man always invents fire and then they burn themselves before eventually figuring out how to tame it. There’s a lot of disruption and loss, and there’s a different timeline for each of those kinds of discoveries. Whether it’s electricity or it’s AI right now, it will eventually figure out its place and normalize. So we knew that would somehow, in theory, happen. 

We shot a scene in the future, sort of midway, where David, the tech inventor of Elixir, is watching the news with his husband. There’s riots in the streets about privilege and who does or doesn’t have access to this technology with the ability to live longer. We assumed it would be a class issue for a while. But it became a left-brain thing that just forced you to think politically. It forced you to think about things outside of the emotions of relationships. So we just didn’t miss it when we took it out. We said that it was enough for Kate’s character to reference it later.

You could go down so many off-branches of this tree if you wanted to for other reasons. But our tree was just being human, living and trying to appreciate life while it was happening. And if it didn’t support that, we cut it out. 

Kate’s character is named Coakley, and that was also a name in your Saul episode, albeit a different spelling. Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) initiated a job at Schweikart & Cokely.

Oh wow! I didn’t realize that.

But Kate’s Coakley only had one friend for many, many years: an AI co-pilot named ROSCO. Does it frighten you that we’re already in a time period where people have emotional relationships with AI chatbots? 

It’s crazy because when we were planning to do this movie, you had to say what the acronym meant for people to understand. When we started shooting [three] years ago, it was just starting to make the headlines [following Chat GPT’s release in November ‘22]. We were like, “Is this going to be a bad thing or a good thing? Who knows?” But I would’ve never predicted in such a short amount of time that early relationships would already be started. I knew it would eventually get there — and who knows where it’s going — but we jumped so far in time to where we want to believe it’s gotten figured out. It’s something that is benign and useful. It actually helps companionship in the proper ways. But I don’t know what we’re going to go through to get to that. 

The movie ends on a hopeful note for the future, but I must point out that a lot has changed in the three years since you shot the film. Do you still have this glass-half-full outlook?

There’s no upside to thinking otherwise. 

That’s a good answer. 

It’s the real answer. (Laughs.) It’s how I really feel. I’m adding nothing to humanity to think otherwise.

You’re currently working on a summer movie called Toy Story 5. 

Yeah, just a little thing.

Is it crunch time right now for you and your team? 

No, it’s past crunch time. We’re on the downslope, but we’re going into post in about three weeks. That’ll be a month. Then we’ll finish scoring, and she’ll be done. So it’s been a crazy ride having these two films overlap.

You’ve probably had meetings about AI and Pixar. Have you seen any evidence yet that AI can make your lives easier without undermining the human touch that makes Pixar, Pixar? 

No, I haven’t seen many examples yet. I’ve seen nothing that’s made me desire anything other than a real artist to talk to. 

John Carter has been reappraised on the internet over the years.

Has it? (Laughs.) 

It has! I’m sure you’ve seen the posts and various pieces on it.

This always happens at least once on every set. We’ll be about to roll, and a grip will whisper to me, “John Carter.” And I always say to them, “You don’t have to whisper anymore.”

When you hear these belated compliments, do you say to yourself, “Hey, better late than never”? Or is it more, “Where were you!?”

I’m past the “where were you!?” I firmly believe there was always that audience. We just didn’t understand that, and we didn’t cater to them [in whatever way] it got overlooked. But it’s nice to know there was an audience for it, and that it’s founded. The nice thing about finishing a piece of creative work — whether it’s a book or an album or a movie — is that it’s there for people to find for the rest of time. Unless it’s banned, it can’t be stopped. So it’s been nice to live long enough and go far enough to know that it’s found its audience. It’s very nice. 

I asked one of my Saul friends what they remember about your episode. 

Oh no.

And the first memory that came to mind was how difficult it was to hang those punk piñatas. 

Yeah, it was a great idea to shoot the whole idea upside down, but it took a while to figure out how to light it with headlights so that you could imply a better, more complicated set than we really had. It was very limiting how long you could hang somebody upside down, and it made for a time crunch that I was not happy about because I wasn’t able to finish every shot I needed. 

Deborah Chow directed the Saul episode after yours. Did you cross paths there en route to you writing on Obi-Wan Kenobi?

We did for a half an hour. I don’t even know if she remembered, but I reminded her when we met online during the pandemic. Obi-Wan was all on Zoom, so I got to know her remotely. 

Years from now, when you look back on filming In the Blink of an Eye, what day will you likely recall first? 

It would be the first day we set up offices to officially shoot. It was the first time in my career that I’d set up an entire treehouse and club based on my taste, my instincts, the way I like to work and who I want to work with. I’d never had that before, and I loved it. 

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In the Blink of an Eye is now streaming on Hulu.